


broken hymn and the bondage overhead

by auxanges



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Body Modification, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Relationship, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Hemospectrum Shift, M/M, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Quadrant Confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-04-05 18:51:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19046305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: At the request of a reformed Alternia's boy-king, weapons-class psionic and unimpressed heir to an Overrun Sollux Captor heads out to investigate freak storms and mysterious deaths. He reports back with the saltblooded descendant of a nightmare queen, her demon-communing moirail, and more questions than answers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thescyfychannel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescyfychannel/gifts).



> prompt:  
> "Hemoflip AUs are pretty fucking awesome. How about Karkat's the heir to the whole damn empire—or highly placed, or something, depending on the Reigning Lore? Hell maybe HISTORICALLY mutantbloods were Known for effecting great change and shit, and often would be crowned as rulers. Feferi's Ancestor, meanwhile, is probably the bloody terror who was killed in disgrace, or maybe she's treated like some kind of myth or wriggler story? People think she's still alive and shit, and no one knows the truth. Except maybe seadwellers. Sollux, meanwhile, is trying to keep his stupid dumbass superior alive, there's a lot going on and he is so fucking tired and he also blames his Ancestor for getting him mixed up in All This Shit.
> 
> I'd really like to see all three of them eventually falling in love despite philosophical and caste differences? Also, fancy ass costumes for Sollux and Karkat for sure, and I'd really like to see what would have happened to seadweller culture/fashion/styles after sweeps of being on the bottom of the spectrum!"
> 
> im always so randy for hemoflip aus happy polyswap

In your dreams, you’re drowning, which is less shitty than you would expect. Memories of it slough off like the day-drugs you shake from your shoulders: all you’re left with is a mouthful of sopor and a phantom grip around one of your ankles. 

You spit over the side of the coon and take a deep breath, filling the spaces between your ribs not occupied by static. The curtains are already drawn, and it’s raining in droves, weather that collects at your temples and the top of your spine. Your pan begs for coffee while common decency politely insists you hunt down pants, first.

It rained like this when they crowned KK. No one seemed bothered by it except you, the hissing of steam where drops hit your skin like a volatile omen. They set laurels fashioned out of beaten obsidian over his hair, treated until the edges looked like dying embers, and Karkat caught your eyes and held them until you suffocated. 

* * *

As much as you hate to admit it, clothing does a decent job of making you feel more awake. You wrestle into a shirt as you pad down the hall to knock on the crown prince’s door.

Yeah, okay, you don’t knock. You give it two kicks and jimmy the latch. “Caffeine,” you declare in greeting, floating over to the machine and dumping a handful of raw beans into the hopper.

A prolonged groan makes its way from the coon over to you. KK wakes up with the grace of a horny lusus trying to hump its way through a flock of parade balloons. “It has not been six hours.”

“Probably not,” you agree, splaying your fingers over the rim of the hopper and letting your psionics pool in your palm: the beans toast in less than a blink, and you blow on a couple that accidentally caught fire. “You haven’t followed curfew since before you knew how to spell it.”

“I was lying awake contemplating the infinite ways this miserable shit orb has yet to let me down.” Karkat leans over the rim to grab at his clothes: scar tissue from where he grew up trying to hide his mutations catch in the dim glow of his quarters, and you wrench your gaze back to the coffee machine. 

“You mean you were watching a full season of _Sixteen Midbloods Gather In A Secular Tent To Prepare Sweet And Savoury Recipes While Adjudicators Provide Sassy Banter And Stand A Little Too Close To Their Baking Stations To Auspictize In Case They Have A Nervous Breakdown._ ”

“Fuck you, it lowers my blood pressure, unlike some uniforms I can mention.”

“I bet you’re talking about the cranky polemarc at the South Gate. Yeah, she’s a real piece of work.”

Clothes do wonders for Karkat, too. If you’re being honest with yourself (something you do a little too much for your own peace of mind, when it comes to the prince), he looks just as good without them. But they’re armour of his own, especially in the stolen evening hours before trolls scuttle in to drape him in fancy shit. If anyone hates fancy shit more than you, it’s Karkat Vantas. Here, where only you can see, the plainclothes assigned to everyone bring him back to where you can touch him. 

The coffeemaker spits out your brew; you dump sugar into it and let it hang by your ear while you wait for the second mug. It means KK has to put a little more vertical effort in acquiring it. “You know coffee stunts your growth.”

“I thought it ate brain cells,” he retorts, attempting to climb you like a tree. The fist he bunches in your shirt as a result is very warm. “Or maybe that’s just a Sollux symptom.”

“Heavy is the head.” You oblige him his coffee and take a long sip of your own. It eviscerates about half of your taste buds. 

Karkat takes a drink, then reaches for the sugar. You zap the container and he pretends to have been fixing his hair. “What worldly problems do we have to fix today, then?”

“Let the world fix their own damn problems,” you grumble. Your tongue catches on the last sibilant and you wince as your dark roast turns semi-blonde with blood. “You’re not paying me to be Alternia’s therapist.”

“That would be a way more exciting use of resources, though.”

You flip him off, then use the same finger to reach behind your head and fiddle with your plates until you find the little indent for your print. You give it a push, and the outside world shudders into existence. 

You pick through the stardust of information at a careful pace, mostly the result of trial and error—too fast, and you’ll trigger a manic episode; too slow, and finding your footing in regular dimensions is a herculean task. Leaning against the coffee counter, you let your eyes do the heavy lifting, your fingers twitching with generations-deep muscle memory. 

“Perimeter scans are still clear,” you report: your voice is a tiny, ineffective thing, and you swat the thought away. “Tracks on an anomalous pressure system over the sea north-northwest. Lowblood insurrection—”

KK makes a “hey” noise, resigned.

You amend, miming a twist with your first three fingers. “ _Cold_ blood insurrection sources from last season have been identified and apprehended. Two out of four perpetrators agreed to an audience with you pending legislacerator presence.” 

“Mhm.” He shares a few more intimate bitchfits with his mug. 

“That’s it. Everything else can wait, unless the unending pleas for interpersonal blessings are jumping to the top of your list.” 

“Aren’t you just fucking adorable.” 

You mute the connection and blink KK’s quarters back into existence, releasing a breath you didn’t realize you were holding. Everything sparkles around the edges before blurring again, and you rub your eyes under your glasses. “That pressure system’s been there all week,” you say. “Rumours are saying it’s artificial.”

Karkat thinks for a minute. You log the piece of his bottom lip that he chews at away for later, when you’re up to your horns in administrative bullshit and contemplating a small wastebasket fire or five. “What do _you_ say?” he asks finally.

“I say anyone who wants to fuck with weather patterns above open ocean has been the true sufferer of coffee brain-rot.”

Truth is, your assigned patrols are furthest from land by right of rank and the universe’s hate-boner for you. Your relationship with the crown prince is made infinitely more complex by the fact that your Ancestor did Great Things or whatever. 

These complications make themselves manifest yet again when Karkat says, “I guess you’ll fit right in, then.”

Dude, come on. “KK, dude, come on—”

“This is me coming on, Sollux! This is me delegating, which every court-happy asshole in the Glass districts is probably getting their rocks off to as we speak thanks to the feedback from the actual fucking feeds in your actual fucking back.”

You sigh into the bottom of your mug before slotting it for a refill.

Karkat softens. It affects his entire body, from the rounded tips of his horns to the subtle downward curve of his mouth to the slope of his shoulders. It should make him look smaller; it has the opposite effect. “The insurrection last season,” he tries again, “I don’t give a fuck about reports, I know that wasn’t isolated. I’m a little tired of advisors treating me like I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.”

He allows for a smile. “You’re not an advisor.” 

“It would make for a more exciting use of resources.” You motion him closer, making a show of fixing his hair as if yours is a model of palace standard. Karkat, to his eternal credit, lets you. Even if the caverns hadn’t shat him out so close to the boiling point, you think he would have found his way here one way or another. 

“You know, Sollux,” he says to your chest, prodding at the delicate stitching reminiscent of the armour they threw at you two moults ago, “you know I wouldn’t ask if there was another way.”

“I know, KK.”

“You know I’d do it instead.”

“I know that too, KK.” You capture a lock between your index and middle finger, letting it slip through your grip until the hastily clipped ends poke out around your digits. “You and the ocean would be a terrible mix.”

He reaches for your wrist, pressing a kiss to the infantry cadence of your pulse. “Takes one to know one,” he says. 

* * *

You leave Karkat with the rest of his petrified sludge in a mug and shrug into the sturdiest weather gear you own. Then, after thirty minutes of logistical wrangling on your outer feeds and ten more minutes of introspective wrangling on yourself, you take a detour. 

The holding blocks for political dissidents and criminals not immediately slated for execution run along a narrow, spidery network beneath the reinforced hub at the palace’s centre. It’s where all the ugly business happens. Being underground makes you twitchy. You set your jaw and punch your clearance tag in with quick, syncopated clicks. 

Some part of you was probably expecting a pair of purplebloods, jamming their skulls full of tainted sopor and preaching nonsense until people were too scared to do anything but follow along. You’re a little surprised, then, when one of the jailed insurrectionists is sitting cross-legged in her cell, peering at you over the rim of her glasses. She looks a little like a librarian, or an archivist. You’ve heard they can get a little bloodthirsty when overdue fines pass the double digits, but this is kind of overkill.

You roll your shoulders and open her file manually. It’s not as effective in terms of information transfer, but you’ve learned it has the practical aspect of looking intimidating a fraction of the time, probably because you don’t give the appearance of staring into space while you read up on prisoners. “Aranea Serket. I anticipated someone sort of bitchier, no offence.”

“You’re not here as legal counsel, are you?” Fuck, she’s cheerful in a decidedly non-clown way. Clowns freak you out, but predictably so. Psychics…they don’t have a common doctrine. Her lips are corpse-blue. 

“Lady, no one in their right mind would let me counsel anybody.” You flip through the pages. “Huh. You have a sizeable file for someone who’s never so much as broken a lawnring restriction.” 

“Call it a genetic misstep,” she says pleasantly, “and I’m flattered you think I can afford a sizeable lawnring.”

Another flip, and all your fangs click together in a full-body cringe at the familiar etching of her Ancestor.

Aranea’s smile does not fade, nor thankfully does it grow into the skeletal rictus of the Marquise. “Any blood assets she had were seized by the Crown in the Overrun. I’ve been on specibus freeze since I was five.” 

“Then why the hell are you in here?” you ask, before the little alarm bells in your pan can catch up and shut your stupid mouth. 

“Same as your Ancestor was, once upon a time.” She stands and dusts herself off, not looking too inconvenienced by the fact that her cell is smaller than your ablution block. “I said something objectively true and people didn’t take to it very well.”

“Yeah, well, trolls are impressionable,” you mutter, scanning the statements. You don’t particularly like this. You feel slowed down, inconvenient; you slam the mental brakes and shake your head to let that train of thought come back to bite you in the ass later. “And if you know my Ancestor, Serket, you know he was no exception. So why should you be?”

Aranea takes a few steps towards you, until the glow of your eyes catches in hers. “Because I have no reason to lie about the Sea-Mother.”

The gears in your head grind to a screeching halt. “Seriously? You got three dozen trolls to throw themselves into the Teeth because you think you talked to god?” 

(The only reason you had even managed to log those deaths as connected before the report came flying in was because you were standing by for an audience of KK’s, where listening to poor saps whine about made-up problems is actually more boring than listening to trolls about to kick it in your head.)

“Firstly, the Sea-Mother isn’t a god, she speaks  _for_ gods. Beast of a different nature.” 

“Okay, please stop calling it that, it’s top of my least favourite bedtime story list.”

She raises one shoulder. “Secondly, if you have a look at that paper, it’ll say it was a political act. And thirdly—”

“Let me guess,” you interrupt, “the literal mind-controller didn’t make them do anything.”

“The ocean is very good at being angry, Sollux,” says Aranea. Her voice does not carry the icy quality you were exposed to in your early drills; it’s as polished as fo’castle wood. You feel, again, insufficient in many things. “She’s been angry for centuries.” 

“Thanks for the tip.” You snap the file shut, tucking it under your arm. “Any other helpful advice?” 

The prisoner crouches down near your feet, and starts writing numbers in the dirt floor of the cell block. 

“Uh.” 

“I know they still implant you with navigation systems.” She glances up at you, placid, and you feel all of six again, stripped naked and rattling off negotiations of what parts of you they could sell to the Crown. “If it ain’t broke, right?”

“I have work to do, Serket.”

“This is where you want to go. She said so, when they appeased her.” 

You knock twice on the block bars and don’t bother to wait for backup. You have never really needed it. “I hope the lawyer they find you is good,” you call over your shoulder. 

* * *

By all accounts, it is not flying weather. It’s not even walking weather, at least not for anyone with the cripplingly endangered resource known as common fucking sense. The palace fuck-giving meter is glued to the floor in this regard, even with the freaky shit that’s been flagging half your connections over the course of the week.

So here you are, coasting towards the coordinates Aranea gave you on the faint probability that you won’t get hit by lightning, or eaten by a shark, or electrocuted by your own goddamn output because the umbrella budget for weapons classes is nonexistent. 

Aha. Now, apparently, is the perfect time for a little self-reflection. The only way your subconscious could be more obvious about what it’s doing is if it actually lowered you down a few IRL feet along your path. Your overseers growing up were careful to avoid outright referring to you as weaponry. That could definitely have just been for KK’s sake—half the court has tripped over their own bulges bending backwards for him—but there’s been an aversion, for reasons you can’t comprehend, to making your post sound anything like what it actually is. 

In another life, one you can track in classified feeds and the cluckbeast-scratch of written word, you would have been a commodity. A means to a more invasive end. Collateral damage, depending on who you ask. Then someone killed the Empress, and revolution sank its teeth into the thawing Alternian home soil, and zealous goldbloods ripped from their destinies were all too happy to be repurposed into soldiers. And then the Crown had the balls to be surprised that they were good at it, as if it weren’t batteryblood right to excel at what you are hatched to do. 

Your current problem? No one will let you do what you are hatched to do.

Okay, okay. 

There. Beneath you, way beneath you, is the source of your week’s interrupted sleep schedule (or, at the very least, the involuntary interruptions). Headwinds smack you around a little until you slow to a hover, grimacing down at the churning sea. It folds in on itself, frothing like some rabid creature no one had the heart to put down: you guess that’s true, if legend’s to be believed. You’re soaked to the bone, but that’s rain, that’s wriggler shit compared to this. 

You set your jaw and plug in for a manual scan. The software is new, but the concept dates back to before the Overrun and has stuck around for higher-level psionics. They don’t get much higher-clearance than you, tragically, so most of your early programs involved bargaining what they could and couldn’t pair with your nervous system. The strobe lights of vengeful sky fade into the background while you work, diverting power passively just so you don’t accidentally drop and electrocute yourself (you aren’t sure the Demoness exists, but if she does and catches you, you’re pretty sure she’ll make fun of you for going out like that). The disturbances that the feeds have been logging at surface level drop well over four hundred feet down. You’re hovering over the gaping maw of something nobody wants to speak of, ever. 

Thunder follows the charged air. For all your griping, you aren’t actually afraid of getting hit by lightning, considering you probably give off around the same energy as this storm. You’d run a comparison for funsies, maybe, but your scans are already catching interference from something out here, and—loath as you are to prove Karkat right—pumping yourself full of caffeine and little else before this trip was probably not the best source of fuel. 

The next thunderclap is directly between your aurals. 

Your gut wrenches at the explosion of sound; your scan flickers again, then stops entirely, as you struggle to keep your elevation. This is bad. Something is very much not okay, and you’re dicking around in the middle of nowhere without comms, without KK, like some death-wish junkie. Fuck!

Fuck your life!

The screaming is not constant. It’s a rolling wave of staccato cut-offs, doing a hell of a number on your concentration. There’s nonsensical babbling under it, grating on your bones. Dizzying you. You need KK for spells like this. You need KK so bad—

Thunder, again. You barely caught wind of the lightning through these clouds. Probably also because you don’t remember climbing up again, like you’re trying to outrun something your body knows before your pan. Too slow. Impractical. Useless. 

The air thins out, whitening your sparks around the edges. The marrow-grinding cry chases you higher, like it can corner you somewhere among the stars. Walls of your own making shake and cave in on themselves. 

You think, this can never reach him. 

Your arm weighs a ton, your chest is a stone, your legs cinderblocks. The screaming won’t stop. It won’t fucking stop.

You see the lightning, this time, not close enough. 

All your insides rattle in time with the storm, like you’re being mined for pieces, a fate as old as the sea. It’s a little hard to tell, but you think you’ve already started to fall.

_This can never reach him._

With your last shreds of consciousness, and with instinct you could have sworn you’d had trained out of you, you wrench open your port and sever the Crown connection.

You’re out before you hit the water.

* * *

You’ve never been good at staying under. You used to joke you’d have made a terrible helmsman because of the headaches you’d give the conscriptors, but KK didn’t think you were the pinnacle of humour for some reason. When they fitted you with your first systems, you shocked three medicullers before they had the good sense to make your psionics trigger the sedation line.

Now, full awareness eludes you. You’re sinking, you guess, but you feel surprisingly chill about it. That’s probably the cold talking—the screaming’s finally dulled down to a muffled drone. You may as well be surrounded by nothingness, cut off from the palace in a last-ditch attempt to avoid deep-frying yourself. 

Drowning might not be so bad, compared to that. 

Then you remember KK. 

Then something wraps around your leg. 

* * *

 You snap back into your body with a sharp breath, like your body had to remember how. Again, an occupational hazard for your caste. You cough out half the fucking ocean while you asses yourself. Under your forearms, you can feel uneven stone: the tide ripples through them, darting around your legs. So at least you have all your limbs. 

You also have a migraine the size of a merchant cruiser. 

“Holy shit,” you croak, rubbing your eyes with the back of one hand.

“Holy shit,” agrees the fishertroll girl sitting next to your head. 


	2. Chapter 2

She smacks you across the face, and then you’re awake for good, prodding at your jaw in shock. “What the fuck!” 

“I thought you were gonna faint again,” the wader protests, which is a pretty strange apology until you realize that, yes, the high ringing accompanying her voice is probably not a seadweller thing and probably a you clinging to consciousness thing. 

You tuck your legs in and force in air. You can taste your earlier coffee in the back of your throat. Everything is terrible. “I can’t be here,” you tell the rocks at your shoes.

“Yeah, no ship, buddy!” She’s leaning in a little, her head cocked to one side in a motion so like KK it almost disorients you further. Her fins are flat, the tines peeling away from the sides of her head back towards you. “You’re naut exactly built foar nor’easters. I’ve seen driftwood with better conchstitution than you!” 

Oh, no, she’s charming. 

“Kid, if I had it my way, I would be nowhere near this…this, uh.” You squint at the sad little outcrop of volcanic puke you’re occupying. “God damn it.”

“Haha, wow, you’re shoal lost.”

“And you’re super helpful,” you shoot back, twisting to glance behind you. Your back pops in three or four different places, and you grit your teeth when your nerves sing their maintenance chorus. Your overseers are gonna kill you if you totaled your implants. “What, no landmarks out here?”

She wrinkles her nose. It is, again, fucking endearing. “You need land for landmarks! Closest piece of shore is six miles that-a-waves.” 

She points over your left shoulder, and you attempt to dredge up your nav system again on reflex: static fizzles in the vacancies of your skull, and you really lean into your adrenaline rush. “The Teeth,” you wager, running a hand through your hair. God, but you’re soaked through. Is that blood on your gear? How did you freefall into the ocean and _still_ manage to keep blood on your gear?

The seadweller nods. “Yup! You can’t reely see them in this weather, though. Too bad.”

“Too bad,” you echo. If you can get to the Teeth, you can find your way back to KK and start unpacking all this nonsense. You move to stand, and your psionics take the opportunity to tell you they’re unreliable at the moment: you teeter precariously for a solid five seconds before stumbling again, the tide rising to meet your stupid face. 

The seadweller is on her feet faster than you can blink, gripping your upper arm with all the steadiness and jolting cold of iron. You stare at her hand for a second, long enough for her to declare, “You’re staying here til the storm passes.” 

“What?” You give a little pull on your arm, and she releases you but doesn’t back away. “I can’t stay, kid, I have to get—”

“Wherebber you have to get,” she interrupts, “the sea will grind you into chum if you try befoar the sky clears. And I’m naut a kid! I’m seeing a fifteenth sweep come dim season.” 

Holy goddamn, she’s not far from your age. “But you’re so…”

“Adorabubble? Fun-sized?” She grins at you. Her teeth are like knives.

“Sure,” you concede. One way or another, you’re shit out of luck for the night: you may as well commit. “So where do you stay?” 

“Far side! You almost crash-landed on the yard.” She starts walking, sure-footed and bare, along the stone, and you have no choice but to struggle after her like you got legs yesterday. 

“You mean in the yard?” 

“No, dummy! On the yard.” 

There’s a slight incline to the rock before it gives way to a ruined hull of steel and dead oak, the closest of three masts snapped at the root to serve as a bridge to the rest of the enormous remains of a ship. 

“Ooooh,” you say, like a tool. Most of your dialogue with this fishergirl has been kind of toolish, in retrospect, but that’s not exactly out of character for you.

She hops onto the wood, and turns to extend a hand. “Shoot!” she exclaims, and for a moment you think the mast is about to completely succumb to rot under the pair of you and skewer you like a sad hors-d’oeuvre before she continues. “I’m supposed to introduce myshellf. Right?”

You blink. “I guess.” 

Her hand is still freezing as she grabs yours, pumping it enthusiastically. “I’m Feferi.” 

If seafoam could speak, you think, it would sound about the same. “Sollux,” you manage. 

She smiles again, tugging you along the beam like it’s as sturdy as the ornate floors of the palace. “Sollux. Whalecome to the shit pit!”

* * *

 

The shit pit was originally pressed as the _Ira_ , a hardened galley dating back to the old regime that refused to get rid of its pennant when the Overrun came. In your early (and only) military feeds, they said the Marquise had lifted it and sailed it off the map: this is pretty damn close to the edge. 

You let Feferi show you around, half-listening while you mentally prod at your comm feeds. As far as you can tell, everything is offline. That’s about what you were expecting—you’re lucky you didn’t tear out some important organic bits in your improvised failsafe. You’re probably wiped clear of the grid. KK’s going to lose his tiny marbles. 

“Can we sit down?” you ask, when the consequences of your actions start weighing down your feet and shoulders in earnest. 

“Shore.” Feferi guides you to a chest piled with sailcloth like some discounted reclining platform; it looks, in the moment, like the coziest thing you have ever laid eyes on. Abruptly, you notice her hands, hovering between the pair of you like she isn’t sure if she has permission to touch you. 

(You don’t know why this bugs you. You’re not really a touchy guy, even when coldbloods aren’t bitch-slapping life back into your shitty body.) “You okay, there?”

She tucks her hands behind her back, lightning-quick, like a wriggler with her hand caught in the cookie receptacle. “I didn’t acshelly think it was real.”

“What, am I bruising already? I’m like a goddamn peach, it’s really terrible. KK thinks it’s because I don’t eat anything that has come within a hundred yards of fruit. So maybe peaches were the wrong metaphor.”

Feferi glubs out a bell-chime of a laugh. You recognize the sound as innocence. “No! I meant your psionics. Do they hurt?” 

Um. “Um. Not technically, no, but I have a full-body headache from the impromptu concert outside your place so they’re not responding fantastically.” You rub your eye again, trying to focus instead on her fins—they’ve been moving this whole time, you realize, tiny twitches that are suddenly the coolest thing in the world. A god of prioritization is you. 

“A conchcert?” Feferi asks, rounding your seat to chase down water with a lower saline content. 

“Long and supremely uncool story.” You wave a hand before raising it to massage your temple. “I have the esteemed privilege of listening to trolls about to die, which is kind of a pain but, like, I mind my business. I don’t know what happened over your little neck of the woods to have a concentration like that, but I’d put money on the whisper probably being responsible. Maybe I should have paid more mind to Serket, if it weren’t for her whole personality thing…”

You’re talking to yourself at this point, a tic that resurfaces when you’re teetering on the precipice of mania shortly before your pan trampolines into it: the fishertroll, though, has stopped her movements, a chipped mug between her hands. 

“You heard the Whisper?” 

“Well, yeah, I think we just established that I hear a lot of weird shit. Here’s an interesting fact. Did you know your internal voice never changes volume even if you’re reading capital letters? I know a thrilling grey-texted exception to that rule.”

“No, no. _Whisper_ , capital _W_.” Her hair whips around her bare shoulders when she shakes her head. “You shoald be dead right now, Sollux!” 

“Um,” you repeat. “I’m. Sorry?” 

Feferi groans at nothing in particular, knocking back the water before realizing it was meant for you, and tipping the rain-saver into the mug again. “She’s been acting up moar and moar. Still! I can’t beelieve you survived so close by—”

Huh. Apparently, you aren’t the only self-talker in the biz. If her appearance is anything to go by, though, her penchant for vocal trains of thought might just be the product of boredom. “I’d love to participate more in this conversation, ki—Fef-ef. FF.” Fuck. “Fuck. Okay, I won’t participate, but can you fill in the blanks a little bit more?” 

“My lusus,” says Feferi, as casual as if she were describing the ship’s paint job. “She has a little prawnblem with hunger pains.” 

“Wait, holy shit. What exactly is your lusus?” More questions build up in your throat, scraping along the tracks that blood and salt left and stinging your eyes. You pick one and roll with it. “Kid, what the hell are _you_?”

She presses her lips together, fins folding like deflated sails. “I think,” she says finally, “I shoald wait for my moirail to get hive befoar answering.”

That stalls you. “Your who?” 

Your perimeter wavers a split second before you hear the tea-kettle charge of a weapon, and you stand up so fast you see stars again. The biggest gun you have ever seen is pointed at your midsection, the tip glowing white-hot. 

“Sit, sparks.”

* * *

 

The second seadweller residing in the skeleton of the _Ira_ is decidedly less cheerful than the first. He’s also bigger: you only have a handful of inches on him instead of a foot and a half, and the way his shirt falls over his shoulders and forearms implies that he’s found ways to compensate for the lack of a Crown diet. His eyes and his rifle do not waver. 

You raise your hands, fingers splayed. Despite your best efforts to conserve your energy with your systems down, your psionics are building up under your skin. Things just love to happen to you. “How about you point that somewhere more useful, buddy?” 

“I said sit down,” the wader shoots back, “then maybe I decide where to aim, yeah?” 

Feferi snaps her gills. “Put it away, Eridan. Sollux isn’t a threat!” 

“Maybe I should resent that,” you mumble, but cast her a grateful look over your shoulder anyway.

The wader—Eridan—maintains his statue impression for another long breath before flipping the weapon at his hip over his arm; it snaps into place across his back. You raise an eyebrow. That’s a pretty old-school naval-issued harness, paired with a decidedly not naval-issued gun. The longer you spend in (aboard?) this hive, the less oriented you are. 

“Are you listenin?” 

“Nope,” you reply automatically, because you weren’t. You barely registered whatever this guy was saying. 

“I asked for a reason why a merc would wash up so far off Crown shores. Courtyard strolls gettin too mundane for you?” 

Your lip curls away from your teeth. “I’m not a mercenary.” It tastes like a lie. 

“But you’re wearin soldier gear. I’m seaborn, sparks, not stupid.” The alliteration is probably not intentional, but the distrust in his stare is enough to needle at your thinning ability to keep still. 

“You pointed a giant gun at me, dude. That’s pretty stupid in my books.”

FF dances between you, jamming a finger in Eridan’s chest. “He has a point,” she says, which surprises both of you. “What would we do with a dead goldblood, huh? Dump him in the deeps and wait paseantly for them to come look foar him?” 

Eridan softens around the edges—his shoulders, his wrists. “Like they’d get this far,” he tries. 

“Use your head, Danny, not your fucking pump biscuit!” 

Wow, she’s fired up. Her accent, you notice, is less pronounced than her moirail’s, but as her urgency grows so do the shadows of her vowels, liquid and permeating the boards. Your systems fizzle, insistent on solving something you haven’t identified as having to be solved. 

Until you do. “The gun,” you say, halfway to standing again. “You’re the Ampora.” 

Eridan’s spine straightens like you’ve shocked him. His jaw is tight, as if he wants to say something, but thinks the better of it. 

“I’ve read your tag. I practically rewrote the Orphaner line file. Fuck, I’m so dumb, I…”

Your gaze falls, slowly, to Feferi. She’s already looking at you, her expression so much like one of KK’s you could throw yourself onto that stupid gun after all. It’s the look of someone whose first self-descriptor tends to be, for better or worse, ‘mistake.’

You let your eyes fall to her tank top, the careful, subtle, agonizingly proud woven curves of her sign into her clothes. “You have got to be shitting me.” 

It’s right about now that your brain cannonballs towards its trampoline, which has also somehow caught fire.

* * *

 

Eridan interrupts you before you even start talking. “You can’t say nothin.”

“Of course I can,” you answer. “Cute of you to think you know anything about me, though.” 

“She’s done fuck-all wrong!” 

You look at FF again, at the unapologetic stance she’s taken. Not behind her palemate, nor in front of him. It’s all so clear to you, now. Everything is just so clear. “That’s not how it works, Ampora. It’s not how the Crown’s going to see it.” 

As far as explanations go, it’s fucking pathetic. Your pan is outrunning your mouth twentyfold, and it’s, if you’ll pardon the blasphemy, a goddamm miracle you haven’t bitten off your own tongue yet. _Ineffective_ , supplies your pan, helpfully. 

Not helpful is Feferi, who asks, “How _are_ they going to sea it?” as if that question isn’t a labyrinth of protected information, ongoing investigation, and urban legend. 

You use your index and little finger to draw a line in front of you, ignoring the pressure in your brain from your psionics still building themselves back up with no online systems to redirect them. “For starters, they’ll see an enemy,” you say, because this is obvious. Clear. “I couldn’t give less of a shit if you jaywalked thrice nightly while chugging soporifics. I’m not payrolled to carry out useless things like blood vendettas.” 

Her fins flick, but her expression doesn’t change from that genuine curiosity. 

“For what it’s worth,” you add, as a concession despite yourself, “the troll I answer to isn’t crazy about them, either. If he knew there was a Peixes hanging around past the inner perimeter, he wouldn’t have waited to send me out here to play weatherboy. He’d want answers, but he wouldn’t want retribution.” 

(Saying her linename strikes you as a finality of sorts. You hope it’s not _your_ coffin you’re nailing.)

Eridan looses a breath, finally moving to sit on the chest you’ve left unoccupied. You have started pacing somewhere in the last five minutes. “So, what, you whisk her away an she answers to some asshole with a saviour complex?” 

“Buddy, I am not in the presence of mind to unpack that surprisingly close take on the Crown Prince’s need to make everyone feel okay—”

“ _—back the fuck up, you actually work for the—_ ”

“But this is kind of my job. I find problems and I fix them. I am unappreciated in my time and probably will be unappreciated in the future, but them’s the breaks, okay?” You gesture vaguely behind you to Feferi, who is watching you with increasing interest. She doesn’t look upset at the thought of being wrangled into the Crown’s periphery so much as intrigued by the whole prospect of…well, society, probably. 

Eridan’s deflated on the chest, following your hand to his moirail. “Okay?” he asks her. His fins are tipped in her direction. 

FF nods. Her curls bounce, and the corners of her mouth turn up, and you feel cinderblocks strap themselves to your legs.

* * *

 

She doesn’t have very much crap to bring. Feferi disappears into a curtained-off corner of the ship while you fiddle with the comm lines. You’re still coasting on all this extra runoff, which means you can amplify this admittedly shitty reception setup enough to ping a message to KK. You have the added benefit of being a walking encryption module; no one will be able to trace this call.

“Sollux?”

“KK, hey, guess what?”

“Sollux, you complete fuckpuzzle of a troll. You overgrown shitweed, I hate you.”

“That’s a pretty lousy guess.”

“I thought you were dead!”

Yeah, you guess he would think that. “Yeah, I guess you would think that. But I’m not, obviously, so we have that going for us.”

“Where the hell are you? You just—you fucking disappeared, sending you out there was the dumbest thing I—”

“KK, we can argue about the statistical stupidity of your choices as ruler when I have a more stable connection.” Your pusher wrings itself out a little bit, at the clipped tone his voice takes when he’s really freaked out, and you dig one of your heels into the boards. “Listen, I think I found what was causing all that trouble at the Teeth.”

“I thought we did, too. That’s why they got arrested.”

“Bigger fish, KK.” You snicker, and hack out a little more salty air in the process. “You’d think that was so funny if you were here.”

“ _Where is here, Sollux_.”

You’re about to berate him for not following your extremely obvious train of thought when Feferi re-emerges, grinning at you like it’s picture day at open trials. Her hair is pulled back into something of an updo, tamed to the best of her ability; her shirt still bears her sign, but has thicker braiding over the sides along her gills. She still doesn’t believe in shoes.

“Is that the KK guy? Say shello for me!”

“I’m not saying fucking shello,” you hiss. To Karkat, “I’m bringing in a Peixes. Don’t do anything stupid before I get back.”

You don’t have to hang up, because the connection drops as soon as you lose concentration. There’s way too much to get done to focus on trivial shit like keeping KK in a loop you’ll close later anyway. You flex your fingers, brushing static off your forearms.

“Storm’s passed,” she announces. You hadn’t even noticed, but yeah, the sigh of pressure along your borrowed spine has let up. “You ready?”

“Loaded question,” you mutter. “Where’s your moirail?”

“Probubbly with the Messengers,” says FF. “He’ll meet us at the boat.”

You look at her, unblinking, over your glasses, in your best _you waders say the weirdest shit and I expect an explanation at some point_ stare. She leans up on tiptoes and boops your nose, then takes your hand. “Wasting night hours, Sollux!”

You are way less qualified for this job than you had previously thought.

* * *

 

Eridan is waiting for you at the boat, which is a generous term for a ragtag bundle of overgrown lolly sticks lashed together. You would really, really, really rather fly back, but you can’t carry both fishertrolls with you and you can’t guarantee they wouldn’t make a break for it unsupervised. (There’s also the inevitable crash of your physical and mental energy awaiting you somewhere between here and the Teeth, but you’ll cross that bridge something something supernova something nerve damage. It’s cool. It’s clear.)

“Wastin night hours,” he says, in a rippling echo of his palemate. He looks tired as all fuck; there’s a weird little ring around his hair that you’re going to go ahead and attribute to moonlight and whatever salt water did to your eyes. “Hop aboard, lubber.”

You obediently hop aboard, and almost immediately keel over: partly because this raft is really fucking unstable, and partly because FF leaps into Eridan’s arms, wraps her legs around his waist and plants the most brazen kiss you have ever borne witness to on him.

(And you’ve been witness to a few brazen kisses, most of them your own.)

She smooths her skirts and sits cross-legged across from you after it’s done, and Eridan takes up the steering oar and pushes you off the bank like it’s nothing.

You say, tactfully, “You just made out with your moirail.”

She replies, “Yup!”

You say, “That’s not…that’s not all you do with your moirail, is it?”

She replies, “Nope!”

Demoness peg you with her death needles. “How, uh. How? Come? How come? God damn it.”

Feferi really seems to ponder that one. “I mean. It gets the job done, doesn’t it? If you’re meant to look after each other, you shoald do whatebber you need to soothe. Sometimes it’s just reely hands-on!”

You are probably gold as a traffic grub right about now. “Right,” you say, and let the subject hang between you with the last of the storm air.

The current favours you. The Ampora keeps an unhurried rhythm with the oar, letting the waves do most of the work. Feferi’s eyes keep darting from the water to you, to the sky, back to you.

Once again, you crack first. “What’s up?”

“Nofin! It’s just…” Her gaze shifts, again, past your shoulder.

“You’ve never been this far out, have you?”

She shakes her head, sheepish. “If there’s errands to be run, Eridan insists on going. I stay on the reef bed to feed my mom.”

“Your mom,” you start, then stop again when a whitecap sends you practically clambering into her lap. Eridan cackles from the oar, and you rake your hair away from your eyes. “You said I should be dead because of her.”

“Yes,” says Feferi, the cheerful co-signer of your death warrant. “That’s what’s puzzling me, too! Trolls of your caste alwaves…you know—”

She drags her index across the delicate skin of her throat and crosses her eyes, sticking out her tongue with a little “bleh!” noise. Even if her freak lusus spared you, Feferi Peixes is dooming you more by the nanosecond.

“We’ve had reports of warmblood deaths along the shoreline,” you say, leaning in like it’s a secret. FF treats it as one, fins fanning like it’ll help her soak in the information. “They’ve been growing more numerous by the perigee.”

Feferi purses her lips. “We try to keep her conchinuously fed, you minnow? We don’t want any trouble.”

“Of course not. Trouble just booty-calls me eight nights a week.” You give her knee a hesitant little pat, and she watches the movements of your fingers, the holographic glint of the webbed pattern in your sleeves. “Listen, KK’s a good guy. Gods know Alternia doesn’t actually deserve him, but I think you’ll get along. Maybe. Hopefully.”

She flashes you a grin that rolls down your back and back up again. “I prawnmise to play nice!”

* * *

 

Your first headache comes when you dock on the back bars of the yard, and no less than four patrolmen scoop you all up in the handsiest escort to the main foyer you’ve had since you and TZ got absolutely twisted and tried to grow dirty messages in the flowerbeds.

“Gentle,” you growl, when one troll gets a little too close to the wires you pull. He jerks back, the only sign that you probably accidentally did shock him. Karkat’s gonna kill you twice.

Once they back off enough for you to flash clearance—your systems are still fritzing, so you have to rely on archaic bullshit like identity badges and hextags—they turn to Eridan, who’s caught between them and Feferi with an expression you thought had died along with the rest of the old ways.

A lot of things happen at once, the seconds stretching in front of you like melted candy. A patrolman lifts the hem of Eridan’s shirt, while a second pries at his gills. Eridan’s foot comes up high, then higher, before crashing down on the second troll’s back. He hits the ground with a thud, rolling over to cradle a bloody nose.

At the same time, FF snarls at the remaining two patrolmen. It’s almost unrecognizable; almost, because you can see the etchings of what everyone thought she would be—larger than life and death combined. Her fins spread, her throat lights up—

—your psionics come back like a freighter blasting between your shoulder blades.

The patrolmen gawking at Feferi crumple. So much the better, if all they’re going to do is stare at a wader they’re probably better off looking for other work. The one holding Eridan also drops, and he kind of stumbles forward, dazed. FF’s fins are plastered to the sides of her head.

Headache two.

You reel in your energy, grimacing at the ache along your sides. Both waders are frozen in place, and for a paranoid little second you wonder if you actually broke them before FF shakes out her hair and says, “Whale that was new!”

Eridan rolls his eyes and tucks his shirt back in. “That’s the welcome wagon, Fef.” You notice, for the first time, the cloth tied around his neck and jammed down his collar. He’s danced this dance before. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth, along with burnt coffee.

“You're chipped?” you ask. “You could have mentioned it.”

His next eyeroll is twice as potent. “Oh, sure, I meant to after our pleasant discussion with my palemate bein hatched from dethroned royalty an all. Maybe over some bevvies.”

KK has never felt further away. “Let’s go.”

Feferi hesitates, glancing back at the fallen patrolmen. “Are they gonna be orcay?”

“They’ll get hazard pay. Come on, we have shit to do.”

“At least let me fix his nose!” she says, and does not wait for an answer before plopping down next to the last troll, who, to his credit, has managed not to shit his britches yet. “You know,” she tells him, reaching up to prod at his sniffer, “my morayeel over there, one time he picked a fight with a coral formation. Blood everywhere! Shoal gross, haha. Anyway, this—”

And you stop listening, because the dude’s face is fucking glowing.

No, it’s—it’s FF, the careful outlines of her fingers as she traces the right path for cartilage to set. She makes a series of grimaces, her nose twitching side to side along with her fins, before sitting back on her heels.

Eridan, who had quietly moved beside you, lets out a very small, very strained “Great.”

“Great,” you parrot, and snap your fingers. The patrolman and his newly healed nose take a power nap. “Karkat is going to destroy me.”

“I like him moar and moar,” Feferi says, pushing to her feet and dancing down the hall to your inevitable fates.

* * *

 

When KK gets tired of the world thinking he has all the answers, he dips into the observatory. Its domed roof looks up at stars new and old, sparkling clouds of debris from the Overrun. You have fallen asleep there before, your limbs tangled together in the least uncomfortable position you could find, galaxies lulling you to sleep.

You find him sitting on one of the plush round chairs, scowling up at the sky like the gods took a dump on his life. Which, you know, isn’t totally far from accurate. This place used to be a pilgrimage, when KK first took the throne, until he got annoyed enough to remind everyone you could see stars just fine from outside.

“Knock, knock,” you call, trying for a laugh and obtaining a real killer voice crack instead. Your internal clock is wrecked to shit.

His head snaps to attention. If he hadn’t been semi-horizontal, you think he might have overcompensated and just faceplanted, and that would have just been the cherry on top this asshole sundae you’ve been served up with two middle fingers and no change.

“I cannot believe you. I cannot. Believe you! Taking yourself offline? Are you perhaps fucking dense? Did the pressure system crack your skull and your brain leaked all over the ocean like a sad little oil spill? Are your remaining neurons sinking to the sea floor for crabs to fight over? This flaccid excuse for a government cannot possibly function with both of us screwing the barkbeast on an identical schedule. We spreadsheeted this, Sollux. We mapped it out. I learned formatting for you, you pan-fermented fuck.”

“Karkat Vantas,” you say, “meet Feferi Peixes. Feferi, this is the Crown Prince, rejector of all titles thrown at him. You can call him Karkat.”

KK stops mid-obscenity, opting instead to stand there with his mouth open, all his tiny teeth caught between a threat display and an attraction to any flies that might be around. FF, for her part, moves to curtsy, but Eridan nudges her elbow and she settles for a wave.

You continue, “Now if anyone needs me,” and collapse in a little red-blue mess on the painted observatory floor.


	3. Chapter 3

You wake up attached to something, which is one of your least favourite ways to wake up. Before you can flip your shit, though, KK’s hands are on your arm and lower leg.

“Simmer,” he orders. Karkat doesn’t do much actual ordering, but this is close enough to count. It’s kinda hot, but you would never tell him.

“You just did,” says Feferi cheerfully, seated at your left. Her hands are in her lap, her moirail leaning against one of the observatory’s bookcases.

Fuck your life a little more, you guess. You push up onto your elbows: someone’s propped you on a gurney, a cocktail of water, sopor and honey-drugs strung up beside you. It feels like someone tried to hack off your head with a spork.

“Do me a big favour.” KK sounds all of six hundred sweeps old. “Next time you want to do a hard reset of your system above the ocean, maybe fucking don’t?”

“You suck all the fun out of my job,” you reply, feeling around at the back of your neck. The Crown wavers its way free, washing over your raw nerve endings, and you sink back against the gurney with a sigh.

Karkat, unfazed by your critique of his short stint as figurehead of a crumbled empire, taps the cocktail bag. “The medicullers are ordering you a week of rest while you recalibrate.”

That gets your attention. “Fuck that. Were you paying any attention to why you sent my impulsive ass out there in the first place?”

“Clearly not, because no one around here tells me shit! The most I’ve gotten out of anyone is from a chipper miniature of the fucking Condesce herself!”

Feferi sticks out her tongue. “I was gonna ask if they gave you a ceremonial staff with your throne, but I’m starfishing to think you shoved it up your chute alreedy!”

“Starfishing, seriously?”

You’re grateful for the drugs in your system, because otherwise you’d be pretty damn close to a heart attack right now. “I’m so glad to see you guys getting along. Clearly, I was worried for nothing.”

“You don’t get worried, Sollux,” retorts KK, “you get a terrible idea and then you pull it off and then you get depressed for no reason.”

“My depression always has a reason. It’s not a good one, but it’s there.”

Karkat’s tapping migrates to your forehead, just really drum-soloing it out on your noggin. You fumble for his hand and press a kiss to it. “You never did guess, KK.”

“That what? You didn’t keel over when an eldritch lusus pitched a hissy fit?” He flips your hands to copy your motion. “Half your inner circuitry is computer.”

“By that logic I’m still half-troll,” you point out, “but I guess it’s nice to be fully not-dead and all that.” 

His gaze is as fond as it is exasperated. “Get some more rest, man. I promise Feferi and her bodyguard will be here when you wake up.”

“Can’t wait.” Fuck, you have so much to talk about. You think of the patrolmen, and whatever state of concussed you’ve left them in. You think of Feferi’s hands, backlit an eerie colour so close to—and so, so terribly far from—Karkat’s. 

You think of Feferi’s eyes. 

You think you’re in deeper than the storm had thrown you. 

*

You dream, again, of sinking.

This time, though, you recognize the curling grip around your ankle. The confidence of her fingers call to mind weaving, the push-pull of season after season draped over the side of a dead ship for the sea to bless.

“I know,” says Feferi, her breath cold on your ear.

You blink slowly, the thread of time unraveling as your nerves reacquaint themselves with machinery. “Know what?”

“I know about the Taxiarch.”

You can’t turn in the blackness, but that’s okay. As okay as it can get when she’s pried you open and read your ancestry on your bones. “I didn’t want to tell you.”

“Tell me that your Ancestor blasted mine to smithereens for imprisoning him?” There’s no malice in FF’s voice, as far as you can tell: there are no fish puns, either, but you’re pretty sure that’s just your subconscious being less creative in that department. “I can’t exactly find fault in that.”

“I’m not like him,” you protest.

She smiles at you. You want to follow it like a beacon. You’re adrift in fog and wires, and she’s your tether. “You are, and you aren’t. Like me and the Condesce, and Dan and his Ancestor, and Karkat and his Ancestor. That’s how they work, stupid! They’re us, and they’re not.”

“I’m not super sure I’m a fan of how easy you can read people, considering you’ve only ever met, like, ten.”

“Tell me, Sollux.” She’s in front of you, know. Surrounding you, her hair blocking out the moons and her gaze holding yours with a steadiness unlike anything you encountered on that shoreline. “Are you missing something?”

“I,” you say, then stop.

Feferi does not look sad. That’s good, you think, because you would hate to see a face so lively fall. “You were spared because you’re missing pieces.”

“I’m telling your moirail to teach you tact.”

She lifts a hand to your cheek, and you shut up. “There’s always something missing! Even out at sea. I was off the map for sweeps and sweeps. And now I’m here. With you, and Karkat, and a whole buttload of trolls who don’t even know I exist yet!”

“Thrilling,” you mumble. It comes out as “thhhhh,” and then you decide to stop making noise for a while and listen to her with your whole being instead.

“We’re like our Ancestors because they were missing things, too,” FF continues: if you try, you can see a circlet in her hair, silvery and quiet. “But we’re unlike them because I think we found what that was.”

All you do is nod.

And lean in a little.

And kiss her.

* * *

 

It feels a little more like a long blink when you do wake up. Honey always seems to do that to you, but with the amount of programming you’re reinstalling, the alternative is insomnia even you can’t palate. You crack your neck and several other joints before someone shushes you.

Karkat’s at the foot of your gurney—the literal foot, his back against the wheel with his charcoal overcoat bunched behind him like a pillow. You’re in the Heir’s hemisphere: green-blue lights dance over the sky and cast curious shadows over your strange little tableau. It gets stranger the more you look, with Feferi tucked in the crook of his arm, her foot hooked around Eridan’s where he’s sprawled out under the open sky like he might float away on the observatory’s depictions of warmblooded victory.

“I feel like I need to go to confession just looking at you,” you whisper.

“Don’t be weird. Confession’s terrible and I loathe whichever Crown lackey decided it was my job to listen to what people wank to.”

“Oh ho, someone’s mad he had to find out what ashtraying really means, huh.”

KK swats at the air between you. “Do you believe in fate?”

“No,” you say, because you don’t. You never have. Fate does not vibe with your cozy little binary view of the world. Things happen or they don’t. Dictators fall, or someone kills them. Usurpers rise, or meet the business end of a culling fork. You love one troll. You…suddenly feel very strangely about another.

FF curls up a little more in Karkat’s lap. The smile that graces his face is brief; your healing systems catch it anyway. “Yeah,” he replies softly. “Same here.”

* * *

 

As soon as it’s safe, you head for the Teeth. Karkat bypasses your bedrest orders on the promise of sitting on you in your coon until you either drown or sleep for more than three hours, “whichebber comes first!” (Feferi had happily agreed to pick up the next shift.)

You’re a sad-looking little party: Eridan and Feferi lead the way as if they’ve known it all their lives, caring little for the wind battering the clifftop and the roar of the waves between the rocks. Karkat’s bunched up in your side, as close as he can be without jumping into your hood. You hate hoods, and you hate the twofold constriction of your circuit bandages and the scream-red hemming across your spine. Leave it to you to be jealous of seadweller clothes.

When you reach the edge, though, Eridan peels off his shirt. On the second-lowest gill slit at his left, you see a Crown inking where they chipped him. It looks older than whatever other body art you can make out through his freckles. You make note of those for later queries to FF (and to see if she’s got any you haven’t been able to see). He bends to kiss his moirail, then frontflips off the cliff straight into the Teeth.

You lean over to ask a very stunned KK, “We weren’t briefed on this, were we?”

He shakes his head.

Feferi does not look worried in the slightest, sitting at the precipice to let her legs dangle over the void. She pat-pats the grass next to her, and you both join her, KK at your right and her at your left. “The first step,” she begins, “is to check what the Messengers have heard.”

“Who are the Messengers?” Karkat asks before you can.

“Oh, they sank ages ago. If somefin’s up, they’ll tell Dan aboat it and then he’ll tell me.” She beams. “And now I can tell you!”

You and KK exchange a look. “We can unpack that a little more when I’m not about to puke,” he decides, ducking to avoid Feferi’s playful kick. “You think they—this—something out there can help us save trolls?”

FF snaps her fins and nods. “No reefson we can’t find out! Besides, the Teeth aren’t the only sacred space around here. But I’m shore you knew that.”

Silence.

Feferi raises an eyebrow, then the other one. “ _Did_ you know that?”

Karkat reddens. It is a very impressive sight when it happens.

“As someone with ready access to every feed from the First Parables to yesterday’s brunch menu,” you confess, “we had no fucking clue.” 

“Shoal more field trips!” Her grin, again, is wicked. _Wicked_ seems to describe her well, if unsuitably, but field trips might be a decent excuse to expand your Peixes vocabulary. 

KK looks out to the horizon, where the edge of the sea disappears over the edge of an un-inked page. He threads his fingers between yours, his thumb tracing the steadying glow of your psionics over the back of your hand. At your other side, FF is trying to be subtle about eyeing your light show, so you save her the trouble and nudge her until she shifts closer. 

“You and your moirail are staying.” 

This had been decided once you had been lucid enough, with little arguing between any party except for Feferi and Karkat, who have taken to arguing like—uh, like fish and mutant with non-functioning fish parts to water, probably. The justification you had sent out to the Crown had been to monitor aquatic resources over a more evenly-spread surface area. But repeated here, where the Teeth threaten to wash the words right out of his mouth, you find yourself hanging off his syllables. Your hands inch closer until the three of you are touching one way or another, their shoulders flush against yours. 

You keep the halves of your world tight at your sides, and together you listen to the march of the ocean, and wait for it to give you answers. 

**Author's Note:**

> dont worry, they'll bang. you degenerates know me


End file.
